Normally, if I was knocking up a Christmas holiday reading list for y'all, I'd just say go out and buy my books. It ain't cheap running a Mountaintop Lair you know. Even the polish for my latest gold-plated hovercraft costs a pretty packet. Not to mention the upkeep on all the Bunnies and disco balls.

But I'm afraid that this year the hovercraft and the Bunnies will just have to remain unbuffed. Because this year you'll be buying Matty Condon's epic tome, The Trout Opera. Buy it for yourself, buy it for your friends or buy it for your difficult auntie but get off your worthless butt and buy it because this sucker is The Great Australian Novel. Ten years in the writing, beautifully realised, every goddamned page is a smack upside the head to the rest of us loser writers who couldn't hope to string together a single phrase with the pure bred artistry that Condon lavishes over nigh on 600 pages.

You could spend the entire Christmas break luxuriating The Trout Opera, but for those speed readers among you I have a couple more book picks for the stocking. If non-fiction is your thing Professor Brooks magisterial oral history of the struggle against the Undead is a must have. World War Z has owned the best seller lists for nearly a year now but I fear that there may be one or two of you who have yet to acquaint yourselves with this important book. Get your teeth into it, before something nasty gets its teeth into you.

If memoir is your gig you'll be wanting a copy of Peter Godwin's When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, which has everything you want in an autobiography. Journeys into a heart of darkness, dark family secrets, and the gathering darkness of a new Dark Age in darkest Africa, or in this case, Zimbabwe.

Of course, not everyone wants their end of the world family sagas so non fictional and for them I'd recommend Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic The Road. Sure, for a post apocalypse novel it's found a bit wanting in the radioactive zombie headcount and Mad Max style car chase scenarios, but it is, you know, kind of brilliant and Pultitzer Prize winningish, even if it is all literate and everything.

Anyway, that'll be your lot from me until sometime in January. I'm sure you'll have plenty of your own Christmas book picks to share with your fellow Instruments. And I'm sure that between us all we can whip up a bitchin' booklist that'll totally lay some hardcore smackdown on the limp, fey little efforts of the broadsheet supplements this year.

Finally, if you find yourself a little twitchy and strung out from a deplorable lack of unbalanced ranting over the next few weeks you can feel free to pop into my personal blog Cheeseburger Gothic where I'm even more insulting and dismissive than here.

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I'm not sure what made me buy the six-pack, perhaps the exciting blue packaging or some vague idea that by drinking it I might somehow regain the imagined six-pack of my youthful tum, consigning to eternal banishment the blubber eel which appears to have taken up residence there.

But you know what, just like low-alcohol beer, the low-carb stuff tastes as though some vital and essentially beery goodness is missing from the mix. I don't even know that I'll finish the six-pack, just because I bought it. Because sometimes, just being there is not enough. Sometimes quality is important too.

Now, sure, not everybody wants to spend twenty-five bucks on a stub of imported ale brewed by Trappist monks according to a thousand year old formula. Not everyone can afford to either. Not every day, at least.

But damn, the sorrows of the world were about a loooong time before you and I were born and here's some sour news for you - they're gonna be hanging around a long time after we're done and dusted. So given the merest flicker of life we enjoy in the larger scheme of things, is there really time to be drinking thin, flavourless low-carb low alcohol fizzy 'beer style' beverages?

Is there a point to rindless bacon? Can anyone really justify the invention of the soy decaf latte? Or the continued existence of free-to air television? Rayon shirts? Disgracefully cheap flat pack furniture? They're all crap, and even if Sturgeon's Law tells us that 90 per cent of everything is crap that still leaves a solid 10 per cent to be had and enjoyed without reservation because of its inherent quality.

We're not talking psychotic levels of indulgence here, like your own jet or Daniel Boulud's Burger Royale, which will set you back 99 greenbacks for a bloodied hunk of wagyu sirloin 'stuffed with braised short ribs, foie gras and black truffles'... although, damn, it does sound good doesn't it.

What I'm talking about is realistic indulgence for its own sake. Sure that glass of French champagne is gonna empty your wallet and kill off some brain cells, but the nasty plastic beaker of Passion Pop is gonna do the same thing, eventually, and you're not even going to enjoy it.

So here's your homework. Go out and indulge yourself. A really great cup of coffee. An air-freighted magazine hot off the press from New York or London. Lunch at the expensive restaurant. Or prayers at the really big cathedral with the all powerful deity and the bitchin' choir full of holy hotties if that's what floats your boat.

Then get back to me and tell me how much better it was than a worthless sixer of low-carb beer.

And in light of Miche's insightful first comment, bonus points to anyone who comes up with an indulgence that won't cost you a buck.

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Hero is a word used all too often these days, but I think we can all agree that Zac Nineteen and Blake Eighteen are the greatest heroes of the modern era.

Hero is a word used all too often these days, but I think we can all agree that Zac Nineteen and Blake Eighteen are the greatest heroes of the modern era. Their waterborne Tuesday excellent adventure, floating from Mowbray Park into the city in a colourful blow-up pool may well have been pointless, and life-threateningly dumb and almost certain to arouse the interest of Mr Plod, newly empowered as he is to randomly stop and drug test the citenzry. But what is life without pointless risk, without danger or challenge or sunburned armpits?

It's boring.

We've all been there with Messrs Nineteen and Eighteen, on a Tuesday afternoon, in Brisbane, in Auckland, in Brentwood, Essex or Kansas City, Missouri, with our brains slowing heating towards meltdown as they turn-turn-turn on the microwave carousel of numbing, unutterable boredom.

Drugs, TV, cybersex, none of them can fill the void for long. You've cruised every nude celebrity web site. You've maxed out the Hell levels on your latest Xbox shooter, shaved the cat's butt, got the dog stoned, had a nap, woke up, shopped, picked your nose, had lunch at the pub, dropped some water balloons from a carpark rooftop, blown up a wheelie bin or two and none of it, absolutely none of it has made a damn bit of difference.

You're bored.

What are you gonna do?

No, really. What are you gonna do? Can you match it with these boys for stupid, unthinking time wastage? Could you ever?

Once upon a time, I could have, probably by the simple expedient of adding powerful hallucinogens into the mix. But I'm older now. Softer. And so I dips me lid to Eighteen and Nineteen.

But surely, somewhere out there someone can top this caper for foolish, ill-advised stunt monkeying. Flinthart? I'm looking at you. Luke? You sure you never did it jungle style with that goth chick in the cemetery. During a state funeral? For a VC winner? I know we got some cops and former military types who haunt this blog. Surely with access to all that firepower you must have been tempted one slow Tuesday arvo to plink a few rounds or even an RPG into the nearest KFC bucket, you know, one of the big ones on the poles out in front of the drive-thru. I mean, they're begging for it.

And ladies, don't tell me you banish the boredom by doing your nails or something. That'd just make things worse. Come on, you must have got up to some mischief at some time.

When Europe collapsed into the fetid charnel house of the Dark Ages, it was the Muslim world, the Dar al Islam in which the spirit of rationality and the light of science burned fiercely. Within Europe the only flicker of modernity was maintained by a handful of Christian monks in heavily defended monasteries scratching away at illuminated manuscripts.

Strange to think that reason, science and the arts were maintained by religious fervour, because nowadays it seems that all the God-botherers are good for is vindictive craziness. It's like, having missed out on all the fun of the Dark Ages, they're rushing to catch up.

How weirdly appropriate that in the week some poor old English teacher is jailed in Sudan for letting her little urchins name a teddy bear 'Mohammed', some mouth-breathing yahoos from the outer wasteland bible belt of south-western Sydney decided to express their faith with a couple of pigs heads on sticks.

The two incidents were unrelated, and yet simple timing and a thematic unity balanced them perfectly against each other. In Khartoum you've got the machinery of a state, powered by Sharia Law, initially threatening to lash a woman for, let's face it, utter fracking nonsense. Now released, after enormous pressure from the West, including Muslim politicians from the UK, she was very much a victim of stupid, unthinking, religious bigotry, which brings us to...

...Sydney, where I'm going to take a punt and guess that you've got a couple of morons, inspired by the increasing bitterness of a campaign against the building of an Islamic school at Camden, who've done three minutes of wiki-research on Islamic religious practice before heading off to the butcher to craft their elegant statement on faith and civil society. Either that or a couple of liberal party campaign workers were just getting in a bit of practice.

Well, a pox on all their houses, I say. Soulless, postmodern materialism might be all soulless and po-mo and materialistic. Not to mention really, really expensive. But I don't think anybody's going to strap on a bomb belt, or climb into their white hooded sheet for a little lynch-o-rama cross-burning action, just because somebody else insulted their Bravia, or defamed the prophet Jimmy Choo, or failed to show the requisite level of appreciation for the awesome righteousness of a shiny new Lexus LF-A.

Well, okay, one or two unbalanced lunatics might, especially pre-menstrual lunatics as regards the whole Jimmy Choo thing. But on the whole your vacuous, self seeking, empty-headed materialist is much less interested in what you think about his or her stuff than they are about getting lots more of it. And if you're too dim to appreciate their aesthetic sense, that'd be your problem, not theirs. They won't send you to hell, because you're already there.

And frankly, given the choice of living in that kind of world or one run by religious nutters, I think I'll take my plasma, my new car, and the warm spiritual balm of gently creeping ennui.

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In this fast-paced go-go world of ours some issues are too important to be left to the ham-fisted, half-arsed witless hysterics of so-called web journalism. But that's too bad. Because that's all John Birmingham has. He's unfair, unreasonable and often unbalanced but in a good way. Words are weapons, and this weapon is a Blunt Instrument.

What makes this city tick? And what need be said, no SHOUTED, to keep it ticking in a true direction? Well-versed wordsmith Rupert McCall rides the undercurrent of a passionate notion all the way to the answers. Rhyme or reason? He'll let you be the judge...

The Magic Spray is a Monday sports column that affronts your senses like Dencorub to the groin. Like its real-life counterpart that's cured countless corked thighs, it may leave you feeling slightly numb, dulling the pain of another working week.

Mother, wife, housekeeper and family diplomat Heidi Davoren does a lot of laundry. She can peg a line full of undies quicker than George Bush can duck a flying shoe. For those of you who battle the mundane and ridiculous on a daily basis – school fees, preservatives, family budgets, soiled pants and banana stains – gorge on guilt-free parenting advice here.

For those who think gossip is a dish best served scalding, there's no need to wade through the magazines or cyberspace for the grittiest pop culture news. Because Georgia Waters has done that for you. She takes the celebrity world for the madness that it truly is. And it's enough to make a starlet choke on her silver spoon.

It's the blog that tackles the serious issues that impact on the lives of Queenslanders. We'll take on the bureaucracy; question and challenge the decision makers; put pressure on the movers and shakers and stick up for the little guy.

Babes in Business are Brisbane women that stand out in a crowd. Not only are they business owners, entrepreneurs, movers and shakers, they are wives, girlfriends, mothers, sisters and daughters. They'll give working women throughout the city the best tips on striking the balance between work and home life.

Regarded as history’s best female surfer, Layne Beachley is a seven-time world champion. But her drive doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. She's had success with her Beachley Athletic and in 2006, Layne staged the richest event in women’s surfing. Recently retired, Layne has turned her focus to investing in Australia’s future by inspiring young women to realise their full potential with her Aim For The Stars Foundation.

Sam de Brito has spent more than a decade writing for TV, film and newspapers. In his first book, No Tattoos Before You’re Thirty, he offers advice to his unborn children. In his latest offerings, The Lost Boys and Building a Better Bloke, he takes the pulse of Aussie manhood. Now it’s your turn as he expounds on the business of being a bloke.

James Cameron has been designing menswear for the past decade. In this time he has witnessed more than his fair share of trends and fashions, most of which should never have involved men, but men and fashion should not be mutually exclusive. There are a few guidelines every man should know and follow and still hold on to their masculinity.

Have a computer or IT problem or issue? Then just Ask Chris Thomas! Chris Thomas founded Westnet in 1994, and today runs Technical Support for the mid-tier Internet Service Provider. Chris has helped Westnet win countless awards for customer service in the ISP space.

Clive Dorman is one of Australia’s most experienced travel journalists. Every week for 17 years his column Travellers’ Check dealt with travel consumer issues. His weekly column now returns online looking at travel intelligence: where the value is, what to do, using the collective information-gathering of you.